Ethics and Intervention [Abstract]

Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 3 (1989)

The moral complexity surrounding intervention is influenced by a broad
spectrum of both ethical and practical assumptions and considerations. "All
these issues," Smith writes, "affect one's ultimate position on intervention,
and different assumptions lead, obviously, to different conclusions."The bulk of
this article is a useful survey of some of the key ethical issues of
disagreement among contemporary authors who represent a variety of approaches to
the subject: traditional and prudential realists, statists, cosmopolitans,
ideologists. Smith's own view, clearly articulated in his concluding section, is
what he labels "tempered nonintervention": "a reaffirmation of the principle of
nonintervention, tempered by the possibility of humanitarian intervention when
undertaken with specific safeguards."